By accident or design, the third trilateral summit that recently brought President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President Hamid Karzai and President Asif Ali Zardari together in Islamabad, took place against the backdrop of a fragile strategic environment.
Afghanistan faces the consequences of Nato’s decision to withdraw the US-led armies by the end of 2014, with their active combat role ending as early as the summer of 2013. Iran is confronted by the United States and the European Union with an economic war that can easily degenerate into a full-fledged military conflict. Pakistan is reeling under the shocks suffered in its poorly conceived and poorly executed participation in the ‘global war on terror’, a situation greatly aggravated by astonishing misrule and poor governance.
The summit provided an opportunity to move towards a dynamic consensus on trilateral and bilateral issues in a revived awareness of an inner ring of immediate neighbours with long common borders. Understandably, Karzai hogged the limelight with his media interaction, his address at the National Defence University and with an endless queue of Pakistani politicians at his door. For Ahmadinejad’s sojourn, the spectre of Iran’s conflict with the West and its regional allies loomed large behind the summit. What could happen in Iran and the Gulf could be no less catastrophic than what has happened in Afghanistan over three decades. Pakistan’s leaders made appropriate statements about denying Pakistan’s soil for any hostile action against Iran and, in the bilateral context, about their resolve to proceed with the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline.
The lynchpin of the western project for Afghanistan that can easily get derailed with disastrous consequences for the neighbours is the present effort to initiate a meaningful dialogue with the Taliban in Qatar, an enterprise to which the three presidents seem to have only a limited access. Afghanistan is walking a tight rope between efforts to influence the Qatar process and establishing an independent dialogue with the Taliban, with assistance from Pakistan. Karzai has only a limited leverage with the US in working out a peaceful transition to an inclusive Afghan dispensation beyond 2014. More
Logic, if brought to bear on regional relations would dictate that Afghanistan's immediate neighbors would be included in negotiations with the so called 'Taliban', and would not be left solely to states that will withdraw from the country shortly. Does this sound familiar? Editor.
